Mark Moore Gallery

For such gendered mythological creatures, mermaids have a peculiarly sexless anatomy, at least below their scaled hips. So when Allison Schulnik paints a work like Mermaid with Legs (all works cited, 2012)a large canvas depicting a seated nude spreading her legs to the viewershe grants these half-women not only their sexuality but their personhood too. Similarly positioned, Mermaid with Legs #2 features a figure surrounded by brushy, flowerlike patterns that radiate across the surface of the canvas. Included in her recent exhibition “Salty Air,” these pictures are typical of Schulnik’s candy-colored impastos of marginal, otherworldly characters. However, this body of work expanded the artist’s language to include a brash, quasi-feminist/polygendered visual vocabulary.

In this group of thirty-one worksa family of oil paintings, sculptures, and works in gouache on